Blogs

The Boy at the Gate is Danny Ellis aged eight. He’s waiting for his Ma at one of the three gates leading into and out of Artane Industrial School. It’s run by the Christian Brothers and has five dormitories with 175 bed, a cinema and a 325-foot long hall, a concert hall, various rooms, kitchens, administrative block. When Ellis talks about the Christian Brothers ‘caring’ for children he marks out the word care by quotation marks. ‘Christian’ and...

Let’s start with the important stuff. In the Acknowledgment’s page Kevin acknowledges all his friends on a writers’ website AbcTales.com. Yeh, I know, never heard of it either. If I had heard of it I might have read some of Kevin’s stuff and in particular the narrator Tom meeting his sister, Karen, her husband Rod (Rod’s a rod) and their daughter Natalie to celebrate his mum’s eightieth-odd birthday, and been wildly impressed. Tom is a writer. I...

Our story of the week comes from In The Day , the utterly incredible novel from Kevin Marman, a.k.a Stan, which is now available from Longmarsh Press and soon from Waterstones and independent booksellers around the UK. If you’re interested, find out how to get a copy and read a full review of the book, here: http://www.abctales.com/blog/luke-neima/stan%E2%80%99s-novel-%E2%80%93-d... . But if you’re not convinced, have a read of ‘Thursday’, our...

I’ve been meaning to write about In the Day for a while now. When Stan (Kevin Marman) first sent me his novel in December, I thought I’d read it quickly over the holidays and put something up by the end of the month. But I wasn’t quite prepared for what the book actually is. And what it is, is excellent. In every respect. And like any other excellent novel In the Day is one you have to read slowly – because there’s so much you need to pause and...

It’s been an exciting week here at ABC – we’ve had two big announcements, our Picks of the Year from 2013 (which you can read more about here: http://www.abctales.com/blog/luke-neima/picks-year-2013 ) as well as the results from our Winter competition (which you can find, along with honourable mentions, here: http://www.abctales.com/blog/luke-neima/results-abc%E2%80%99s-winter-competition ). All of which makes for some excellent reading (for...

The results are in! But first a big thanks to all of you who participated. We had a great turnout, with forty submissions, and we managed to raise almost £200 – which means two cash prizes of £50 to each of our winners. But the competition was very fierce. In our reading we saw every aspect of Winterness adapted, remembered, parodied, pastiched and perfected, which made for fascinating few weeks of reading and some very difficult judging. But...

So much for putting him away for a few months! That was the plan but the stable is in great form so we decided to give him a run out today at Ludlow. Where is Ludlow? I hear you ask. Well, imagine the end of the world and then a bit farther than that! It's in Shropshire and close to Wales. From London the train takes over 3 hours and then theres a short cab ride. To be honest for a race that lasts a few minutes its not worth it. Even though I...

Tony and I have spent the past few weeks reading and rereading the best content from 2013 — trawling through the awards and the pieces we had squirreled away on folders on our desktop. It’s been a fabulous year in more ways than one, but the thing that is most astonishing to me, as a new member of the ABC community, is the quantity of truly excellent work on the site. Over and over again I’ve come across poems that have stopped me in my tracks,...

Sometimes you pick a book and sometimes a book picks you. I’d looked at this book, read a little and put it down again, read a little and put it down again. It looked to be one of those books I tend to specialise in writing that nobody ever reads and fades from memory quicker than a cuttlefish. You might not know what a cuttlefish is and neither might I, but somewhere in the world someone does, and that’s enough guff. The sign of a good book is...

This book is described as a fable, a conceit, a what if? It’s I’d guess aimed at children or adolescents, although, of course books like the Northern Lights series, Harry Potter, Little Women or Treasure Island were also read and enjoyed by those that can be described as being more adult. I can’t say I enjoyed The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas much, but maybe that proves I’ve finally grown up and become more mature. It’s quite a simple tale. Nine-...